I was not involved in this change, but the meaning of "Free" software (in the GNU sense) and "Open Source" software (in the OSI sense) is basically the same. The difference is more of an ideological one, and I don't know if the Wesnoth project wants to take a stance here.

I'm curious what are the reasons for this change.It's not realy important to me if a project call itself 'free software' or 'open source'.But if the chang was intentional like you say there must be reasons.Is it just because the term 'open source' is much more common today or is there a ideologic reason as well?

Vultraz, as the Community Manager and project lead, is more familiar with the exact reasoning than I am, though my understanding is that it was changed in part because they are similar as well as to try to avoid drawing in people who are much more strongly in favor of Free Software purity than makes logical sense.

For example, there was a recent issue opened (and quickly closed) on Wesnoth's Github where someone outright demanded that Wesnoth remove the in-game add-ons manager because of the decision to allow the non-Free Creative Commons NC and ND licenses to be used in add-ons, even though mainline Wesnoth is still entirely under the GPL and neither of those CC licenses are allowable for mainline art or music.

99 little bugs in the code, 99 little bugstake one down, patch it around-2,147,483,648 little bugs in the code

Thanks for posting that. As someone who's never really had much to do with FSDG and the like, it's good to see that stas is not the norm there

That said, I doubt Wesnoth is going to switch the wording back (though I'm also not the person who'd make that decision). stas was the most recent issue that cropped up, though certainly not the only one. More practically speaking though, the simple fact is that there's no one involved in the project right now who feels strongly enough about it to make it an issue, much less given that Wesnoth has been chronically short on developers for a while now and this sort of thing is not something anyone really wants to spend a lot more time rehashing all over again.

As far as allowing all Creative Commons licenses on the add-ons server, and CC BY-SA for mainline, that change has been a long time coming, with the hope that it'll be a benefit for the large segment of people who view the GPL as less than ideal for non-code contributions. Likewise, Wesnoth's release on Steam has been something that's been talked about for a while, and is a way we're hoping we can bring more attention - and from that developers/contributors - to the project.

99 little bugs in the code, 99 little bugstake one down, patch it around-2,147,483,648 little bugs in the code

Pentarctagon wrote:For example, there was a recent issue opened (and quickly closed) on Wesnoth's Github where someone outright demanded that Wesnoth remove the in-game add-ons manager because of the decision to allow the non-Free Creative Commons NC and ND licenses to be used in add-ons, even though mainline Wesnoth is still entirely under the GPL and neither of those CC licenses are allowable for mainline art or music.

Its sad and unfortunate that there are actually problems like this... I am glad to hear that it was quickly resolved.

EDIT: Also i think it is good that the new website has been updated with the new logo, and now matches the 1.13 style to some extent. (as some one told mentioned when i first downloaded 1.13, and disliked the change of style, you get used to a particular thing - but the new style has grown upon me and i actually prefer it now)

This should, I think, in principle be easily handled. For example, let users specify their personal preferences, and then make available contributions based on this or that licence. (By "handled" I refer to handling from the code side.)

That way users can prefer what they want to. Though, in fairness, I doubt that the account that posted, even was someone who was using wesnoth in the first place - it is just a vampire troll stealing time. However had, even then, the code could automatically allow for auto-picking what is appropriate.

If people want to use other graphics, for their own personal variant, in an easy way, why not? Code should serve people, not licences per se.

To on-topic new website - I think it is more elegant than the old one, but I struggle a bit with the navigation. In particular what I miss is the news entry - old homepage had news entry right on spot. Perhaps this could be re-enabled in some way ... don't need ALL news, just like the news of the last 2 releases or so.